Three Square Meals Ch. 060

Mikaboshi turned towards John, and a wicked smile formed on his face as he said, "Now, perhaps you and I can get better acquainted..."

***

Guided by retro-thrusters, the Raptor gunship slid smoothly from the Hangar Bay of the Invictus, the door closing behind it as soon as it was clear. Alyssa brought up the Sector Map, and even though the long range sensors on the Raptor weren't as powerful as those on the Invictus, she could still see the battlecruiser at the edge of her sensor sweeps. She plotted her course in a couple of seconds, then powered up the Tachyon Drive in the gunship. They were swathed in a soft blue aura of Tachyon particles for a moment and then the Raptor slipped effortlessly into hyper-warp.

"How do you intend to stop them?" Irillith asked quietly from the co-pilot's seat. "That ship's too big for us to interdict."

Alyssa glanced her way, and her voice reverberated eerily as she replied, "I was planning on ramming them, but are you able to hack them and shut down their FTL drive?"

Irillith was shocked at Alyssa's calm declaration of her plan to ram another ship while in hyper-warp, and she hesitated before she replied, "The Raptor isn't equipped with the comms relay that the Invictus has. The comms portal in this gunship probably isn't strong enough to hold my signal."

"I'll boost you," Alyssa said grimly, her eyes blazing as she stared at the fleeing ship.

The Raptor tore through hyper-space, travelling at over three times the hyper-speed of the unwitting battlecruiser Amaterasu. Irillith could clearly see their objective in the tactical display, and the hulking ship looking fearsome and imposing, even as a ten-inch holographic model. It was nearly fifty percent larger than the Invictus, measuring in at seven-hundred-and-fifty metres long, and bristling with gun decks.

The Amaterasu had been heavily customised, and the black hull was covered with thick, dark-red armour, while the batteries were already exposed, rather than hiding under protective plating. Irillith could see Beam Lasers, Laser Cannons, Heavy Cannons, Gauss Cannons, and a substantial defence grid of Gatling Lasers swathing the huge ship. Having said all that, she knew full well that the Invictus would be able to cut this ship to pieces, especially after witnessing Calara tear into the Loki. Things had changed now, though, with Calara and the Invictus both crippled, leaving them to pursue in a mere gunship.

It took them five minutes to catch up to the much bigger and slower vessel, and Alyssa brought them in ever closer, despite the warning messages flashing on her console. Ships travelling through hyper-warp left a wake of disrupted hyperspace behind them, and smaller vessels caught in that wake were in significant danger. Alyssa seemed unperturbed however, making dozens of tiny course corrections to bring them alongside at a perilously close distance.

The two women shared a look, and Irillith felt that tugging in her chest as she began to Astrally Project herself out of her body. It only took a second to peel away her ethereal Spirit form, and she dived into the data jacks of her console.

***

Servant Kasai was sitting up on the Bridge of the Amaterasu, when a strange alarm went off on his Pilot's console. It was one he'd never seen before, despite nearly a dozen years spent flying Master Amatsu Mikaboshi's battlecruiser. He frowned as he pressed the button on the console to acknowledge the alarm, and a bright red circle appeared on the system map next to their ship.

"Warning," the navigation computer intoned. "Approaching vessel exceeding minimum safe hyper-warp clearance."

He leaned forward and stared in astonishment, as a tiny ship, perhaps only thirty metres in length, appeared to be racing alongside them. Even though the Amaterasu was equipped with a state-of-the-art military FTL drive, this pursuing vessel seemed to have caught up to them with ease. He blinked a couple of times, rubbing his eyes before staring at the map again. Sure enough, what looked like some kind of gunship was drawing in beside them.

"Matsuki, look at this!" he exclaimed, turning to his colleague manning the Engineering Station. "Is that a gunship chasing us? What the hell's it doing?"

The other man was older, with a neatly trimmed beard. He stared at the younger man, in case this was some kind of trick, but when he saw that Kasai was serious, he looked up at the System Map. He squinted at the gunship, and said, "Maybe it's some kind of distorted sensor echo. Vessels that small don't have FTL drives, you know that as well as I do, Kasai."

The two men glanced at the third crewman on the Bridge, Servant Oshiro, who manned the Tactical Station. The lean, flint-eyed man glanced once at the system map, then snorted at them derisively, rolling his eyes. The thought of a jump capable gunship was too absurd to even contemplate. With no one left to ask, Matsuki and Kasai shrugged and decided to ignore the mysterious sensor contact.

***

Irillith had made a connection from the Raptor to the battlecruiser, and she leapt out through the swirling portal that signified the boundary of the Raptor's digital network. The path between the two cyber realms was shadowy and insubstantial, appearing like a wavering grey bridge between the two networks. She did her best to push ahead across the tenuous link between the systems, but the transmitter from the gunship just didn't have the bandwidth to support her digital signal.

*It's no good, the signal can't support me,* she reported to Alyssa, feeling a nagging pang of worry that this now meant they'd be falling back on the ramming plan.

*Let me help you,* Alyssa replied, the sensation of two voices overlapping each other even stronger now that they were communicating via telepathy.

Irillith's eyes opened wide as she felt a huge surge of psychic energy pour into her, and she gaped at her hands as they were swathed in roiling clouds of violet eldritch power. She gasped as she held them outstretched before her, and the shadowy path was snapped into a rigid, unwavering purple-hued link to the battlecruiser Amaterasu. She soared down that link, and dived through the portal into their private digital network, blasting through the protective firewall and sending it cascading away in a million tiny fragments.

***

A loud warning siren filled the Bridge of the battlecruiser, and Servant Engineer Matsuki stared at his console in shock.

"What's happening?" Kasai asked him urgently, not recognising the cadence of the siren. "What's that warning mean?"

"Someone just hacked into our network," Matsuki blurted out, "But that's impossible!"

"The gunship?" Kasai cried out in alarm, sharing a worried glance with the engineer.

Tactical Servant Oshiro shook his head, and said contemptuously, "No gunship has a FTL drive, and no ship in the galaxy is that fast!"

Suddenly the battlecruiser began to shake violently, massive vibrations causing the Bridge crew to clutch fearfully at their chairs.

Kasai stared at his Pilot's console with growing fear, and said, "We've been knocked out of hyper-warp!"

Oshiro was the one who looked shocked now, and the lean man stammered, "Nothing smaller than a cruiser could interdict us. That's impossible!"

The vibrations ended and the battlecruiser Amaterasu was dumped unceremoniously from hyper-warp, as more alarms began to clamour around the Bridge.

"That gunship is real!" Kasai hissed, seeing the white Raptor clearly for the first time. He desperately powered up the sub-light engines, so that he could begin making combat manoeuvres.

"Shields up!" Oshiro ordered, his calm professionalism taking over in this emergency situation.

"I can't!" engineer Matsuki yelled back. His voice climbing several octaves as he shrieked, "They're not responding! The hacker has put them into a looped maintenance diagnostic!"

There was a crackle as the big view-screen sprung to life. A violet image coalesced on the screen, sharpening into a woman's beautiful face. Rather, it would have been beautiful, if it hadn't been contorted with fury.

"You killed one of us, now you're all dead men!" she screamed, finally having an outlet for her grief, frustration, and anger.

"Eject the comm relay!!" Oshiro yelled at engineer Matsuki, who was staring at the screen, paralysed with terror.

The petrified man wrenched his eyes away from the screen, pressed several buttons on his console, then moved his hand over another. His hand wavered for a moment, as he was wracked with indecision.

"Do it!" Oshiro bellowed at him, "Before she tears the ship apart from the inside!"

Matsuki slapped his hand down on the console, and the emergency ejection system kicked in, disconnecting the comm relay from the Amaterasu and blasting it clear. Ejecting the comm relay meant that the Amaterasu now had no way of communicating with the outside galaxy, leaving them in a complete comms blackout.

***

With the connection cut, Irillith was booted out of the battlecruiser's cyber realm and her spirit form was snapped back into her body. She gasped for breath, reeling from the shock to her senses, and her wild eyes darted over to Alyssa.

"I took out their FTL drive, and I crashed their shield generator," she reported between lungfuls of air. "They kicked me out before I could attack anything else."

"Good girl," Alyssa replied, taking a firm grip on the flightstick. Her eyes narrowed, the glowing radiance not diminishing in the slightest as she snarled, "They're mine now."

***

Amatsu Mikaboshi stepped back from his quarry, empty hypo-injector in his hand. "This is so much more fun when my subject is awake," he said with an evil grin on his face.

He turned to his right, and unfurled the tools of his trade from the black velvet wrap. He had done this so often, he had the precise motions of his hands practiced to an artform, and the wrap smoothly unfurled, running the length of the table. It revealed the wickedly barbed and hooked implements of a master torturer, and Mikaboshi nodded with satisfaction to see his old friends once more.

John was still unconscious, and although the Master assassin found it highly entertaining to see the terrified faces of his victims when he suddenly displayed his tools like this, he was eager to get started. He knew that the counter-serum to Shinatobe's tranquiliser was fast acting, but he was feeling too impatient to wait for it to kick in.

Suddenly the floor began to tremble, the vibrations growing in strength, and Mikaboshi held out his arms for balance. The shaking increased, so he activated his stability magnets, locking him in place against the Titanium-plated floor. He frowned in confusion, recognising the tell-tale signs of his ship being forcibly pulled from Hyper-warp, but he had no idea why they'd been interdicted.

A chime from his optical HUD echoed through his head, and he glanced at the internal comm message from the Bridge in irritation. "What's going on?!" he growled. "Did we just drop from Hyper-warp?"

Tactical Servant Oshiro's panicked face appeared in the small video feed image, and he said, "A thousand apologies, Great One! We're being attacked by a gunship! They hacked-."

Mikaboshi cut the man off, his voice menacing as he hissed in fury, "You dare to disturb me with tales of a gunship?! Why aren't you handling this, Oshiro? Have you outlived your usefulness?!"

"No Idaina-sha, I will resolve the situation immediately!" Oshiro replied in a rush.

"See that you do," Mikaboshi said ominously. He cut off the call, then turned back to glance at John who still hadn't stirred, and said, "Now, where were we..."

The Master Assassin turned away from John to examine the sinister implements arrayed before him, and his fingers began to dance over his favourites. The digits seem to skip merrily between the eye-gouger and the tongue-remover, but he couldn't quite make up his mind.

***

Edraele had been terrified as she'd listened to John's thoughts throughout his fight with the assassin. As bad as it had been, tuning in to his inner voice when it had been filled with worry and self-doubt in the lead up to the confrontation with Nexus, this had been a thousand times worse. When she felt him go silent, succumbing to the tranquiliser and now at the mercy of his opponent, she had nearly been overwhelmed with horror.

For the last thirty minutes she'd been on tenterhooks, desperately waiting for him to awaken, and when he gradually began to stir, she felt an immense surge of relief. She could feel his sense of confusion when he couldn't move his arms or legs, and when he glanced down groggily at the chains binding him in place, his train of thoughts began an internal monologue.

"Can't move... chains... mouth tastes of sawdust... spotlights... Alyssa? Girls? where am I?"

Edraele felt a surge of hope and she gathered her will, readying herself for action.

***

Alyssa pulled the flightstick hard to the right, while powering up the engines, smoothly pivoting the gunship to begin her attack on the battlecruiser Amaterasu. The Tactical Overlay showed her the dozens of fire arcs from the battlecruiser, and she memorised them with a glance, only specifically taking note of those from the Heavy Cannons and the Gauss Cannons.

The Raptor flipped and rolled with effortless grace, as though the ship was now truly at home amongst the stars. The battlecruiser opened fire with its huge arsenal of weapons, and she nimbly dodged the fusillade of shots, with the incredibly agile gunship moving much too fast for the enemy gunner to track her. She brought the Raptor around so that she was facing the lower port Hangar Bay, and then held position as she took careful aim.

***

Kasai watched in shock as the incredibly manoeuvrable gunship showed the flight characteristics of a light fighter, flipping and rolling with bewildering ease. Tactical Servant Oshiro realised he had no chance of hitting it with anything other than the Gatling Lasers, but even with those rapid-tracking, turreted weapons he'd struggled to score more than a few hits on its shields.

The sparkling white gunship raced towards them, shrugging off the ineffective hits, and making Kasai think they were being attacked by some sort of ghostly wraith. Despite the utterly ludicrous scenario of a gunship approaching on an attack vector towards a hostile battlecruiser, Kasai still felt a shiver of fear run up his spine.

Suddenly the gunship came to an abrupt halt, pointing directly at the lower rear of the battlecruiser. Not caring what it was up to, Servant Pilot Kasai yelled triumphantly, "Now, Oshiro! Hit it with everything!"

Oshiro didn't need the ship's pilot to tell him when to fire, and when the Raptor suddenly stopped dodging around, he placed the crosshairs right over it, firing every weapon he had. Regretfully the gunship was sitting outside the fire arcs for his Heavy Cannons and Gauss Cannons, so he had no line of sight with them. However, he was still able to open up with four Beam Lasers, nine Laser Cannons, and eighteen Gatling Lasers. A massive cascade of orange beams, laser blasts, and laser bolts enveloped the tiny gunship, blotting it from view on the Tactical map in a blazing flare of amber light.

He looked up from the fire control overlay, and grinned triumphantly at Kasai and Matsuki, who both wore jubilant, if somewhat relieved grins. Those happy expressions were wiped from all their faces a second later, as the battlecruiser was rocked by weapon impacts. Red lights flashed and warning alarms chimed, as the computer voice from the damage computer announced, "Hull Breach!"

They all stared up at the Tactical Map, and gaped in horror at the white gunship as it blasted the battlecruiser with two blindingly bright azure beams. The shots slashed through the armour covering the Hangar Bay doors, and the gunship pivoted, scything the beams along the length of the Hangar. Even more horrifying than the incredible damage it had just inflicted, was the fact that the gunship didn't show a single scratch or scorch mark from the furious barrage that Odachi had just unloaded on it.

Kasai pointed at it with a trembling hand, his eyes wide with fright as he hissed, "Akuryo!!"

The other two men stared at each other in terror. An Evil Spirit... yes, there could be no other explanation.

***

Amatsu Mikaboshi felt the ship shake again, but the vibrations felt different this time, and he knew his vessel had been hit by powerful weapons. He narrowed his eyes in anger, putting down the eye-gouger he had selected, and activated the internal comm.

"Odachi!" he snapped, barely keeping his temper under control. "What's happening you imbecile?"

"We're being boarded...by Akuryo!" the man wailed, clearly scared out of his mind.

Mikaboshi realised his servant was too terrified to be reasoned with, so he just cut the comm channel without responding again. He ground his teeth in anger, as he realised he'd need to repel this invader himself. With a sigh of regret, he resigned himself to getting this business with John Blake over and done with as quickly as possible. As much as he was looking forward to torturing John for days on end until his inevitable death, he hadn't lived to one-hundred-and-thirty-five just by carefully monitoring his diet and vitamin supplements. He'd done so by being very careful.

The master assassin walked up to John, placed his hands around the man's throat and began to squeeze. He had promised himself that he'd choke the life out of him with his bare hands, after all.

***

*NOW, JOHN!!* Edraele screamed at him through his befuddled mind. She sent him a surge of psychic energy which helped him burn away the last of the tranquiliser, and snapped him back to full awareness.

John's eyes flicked open, and he found himself staring face to face with a tanned, black haired man with sharply angular eyes. He felt the man's incredibly strong hands began to squeeze around his throat, and he realised he had seconds to react before his larynx would be crushed.

"My hunt ends here, Mr Blake. Goodbye..." Mikaboshi said with grim satisfaction, his powerful hands squeezing tighter.

"RAWRRRR!!" John roared, focusing all his will into his psychic strength.

His muscles flexed, and he tore his right arm free from the chains, snapping through them like they were made from tissue paper. The mysterious assailant gaped at him in stunned disbelief as John grabbed the man's left forearm in a vice-like grip, then yanked back savagely. The hideous tortured squeal of metal twisting against metal filled the room, and as he ripped the man's arm from his shoulder, John blinked in surprise at the shower of sparks that accompanied the dismemberment. The synthetic limb he was holding was heavy in his hand, so he whipped it back like a baseball bat, and battered his attacker across the head with it.

Mikaboshi lifted off the ground from the colossal impact, and was sent cartwheeling backwards to crash into the rear wall of the interrogation room. His metal chassis was heavy, and the wall crumpled as he smashed through it, ending up with him bouncing off the far wall in the corridor. His HUD flickered intermittently from the impact to his head, and he staggered to his knees, staring back into the room in utter astonishment. He watched John flex the muscles on his left arm, ripping the half-dozen lengths of chain restraining it out of the wall.

This hunt was now providing Mikaboshi yet another emotion he hadn't felt in more decades than he could count.

Fear.

He decided it was one he would rather do without.

***

Alyssa brought the Raptor in to land inside the Hangar Bay of the battlecruiser, carefully avoiding the jagged glowing remnants of the hangar doors in the blasted portal. There were several men running across the hangar, but she could feel John's presence a few decks above her, so she gunned them down without a second thought. The six Pulse Cannons opened up, punching huge glowing holes through anyone trying to flee, and a couple of seconds later the room was deathly still.